The Nottingham told Mortgage Solutions it had made sure its changes would have minimal impact on brokers, with the move from an income multiple system to an affordability calculator being the biggest modification.
“This tool asks brokers six or seven more questions about expenditure which we didn’t before,” head of intermediary sales Chris Parker told Mortgage Solutions. “These are things that a broker’s should already have under their factfind but that they didn’t have to tell us previously.”
The mutual has been piloting the new processes with a number of broker firms since the start of February and has already made ‘tweaks’ to its system to ensure it remains user friendly for advisers.
As part of the changes the Nottingham will no longer accept any execution-only applications as of tomorrow.
Changes to its supporting documentation requirements, including the requirement for three bank statements and payslips instead of one, were made six months ago.
The new affordability calculator will go live on Tuesday 18 March as the lender looks to clear its pipeline before the April deadline.
“We’re going early to make sure most of the train is MMR-compliant by April 26. We have a cut-off date for all business and we’ll be working with brokers if there are any cases that don’t look like getting to offer by that date.”
Parker also moved to calm fears of a market slowdown, saying the Nottingham has bolstered its intermediary team to help the transition to the new regulatory regime go smoothly.
“The market is very positive at the moment,” he said. “It seems people are keen to do business and the market is here. From our point of view we’ve made sure we have enough resources to cope and we have beefed up our intermediary team.
“We want to lend, we don’t want to slow business down. The goal for us is to lend to everyone we who we were lending to before the MMR as we feel our lending decisions were good before.”
Last month Mortgage Solutions reported on the Nottingham’s plans to launch a whole of market broker service, following a 24% rise in gross mortgage lending in the previous year.